BOOKS OF THE TIMES; Advice After Two Decades Of Arab-Israeli Diplomacy

By ETHAN BRONNER

Published: April 16, 2008

THE MUCH TOO PROMISED LAND

America's Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace

By Aaron David Miller

407 pages. Bantam. $26.

In 1990, after the administration of George H. W. Bush had begun talking with the long-shunned Palestine Liberation Organization in the hope of brokering Middle East peace, one of its groups launched an unsuccessful terrorist attack on a Tel Aviv beach. The P.L.O. leader Yasir Arafat refused to expel those involved or distance himself from the operation. The secretary of state, James A. Baker III, new to Mideast diplomacy and already frustrated by its endless ups and downs, said to an aide, Aaron David Miller, that ''if I had another life, I'd want to be a Middle East specialist just like you, because it would mean guaranteed permanent employment.''

In the next 18 years Mr. Baker became something of a Mideast specialist himself, and like Mr. Miller, has not wanted for gainful employment. And in this final year of the George W. Bush administration, Mideast specialists are lining up once again to try to achieve peace between Israel and the Palestinians, with proposals that look awfully similar to previous ones that failed.

As Mr. Miller, who spent most of the past two decades as a central participant in those efforts, notes in this revealing and well-written memoir, ''Albert Einstein said that the definition of insanity is continuing to try the same approach to solve a problem but expecting different results.''

Mr. Miller, who left government in 2003 and is now a researcher, has a few ideas about how to move forward, but mostly he has sobering tales from the front. He does not spare himself. He recounts, for example, that in 1998, despite many setbacks, he publicly stated that the peace process begun in Oslo in 1993 had reached a point of no return.

''It was as bold (and na?) an argument as I had ever made,'' he writes. He says that even as he felt doubt creeping in, he suppressed it, because the excitement of being part of history outweighed rational analysis.

While Mr. Miller does not prescribe a revolutionary remaking of the peace process, he does devote much of this volume to puncturing what he considers American illusions in the hope that the next round of diplomacy will be more successful. Like his colleagues (including his friend and onetime boss Dennis Ross, who wrote his own account four years ago, ''A Missing Peace''), Mr. Miller came to realize that Arafat was highly problematic. But unlike Mr. Ross or Bill Clinton (whose memoir addressed the topic), he argues that the United States has given Israel too much leeway and failed to push it to live up to commitments and make painful choices.

He says Mr. Clinton was far too impressed with former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, even suggesting that Mr. Clinton viewed that Israeli soldier-statesman with a filial reverence. He adds, ''So we never had a tough or honest conversation with the Israelis on settlement activity.'' He also writes, ''Long after Rabin's death, the pattern set by Clinton in the early years would continue. ...''

Mr. Miller, who earned a Ph.D. in Middle Eastern history from the University of Michigan and in the 1980s wrote two books on Palestinians and the P.L.O. while having almost no contact with actual Palestinians, pitches this book as a kind of nonfiction bildungsroman, taking him from political innocence to a tough maturity. The son of a prominent Jewish family in Cleveland with close Republican ties, Mr. Miller offers a picture of himself as someone who slowly and painfully learns that the Middle East conflict is far more complicated than a contest between good guys and bad.

''When you get to know people by actually sitting down and listening to them,'' he writes of the Palestinians, ''your views begin to change.'' He quotes the Palestinian negotiator and intellectual Hanan Ashrawi as saying that Israelis were given all the carrots, and the Palestinians the sticks, and adds, ''She was basically right.''

Apart from such self-criticism, what is unusual about this memoir when compared with other, similar ones is how lively, even irreverent, it is. Mr. Miller is a fine raconteur who fills his pages with real characters and sly observations. When he first met Arafat, he says, he was struck by how much he looked like Ringo Starr in Arab headdress. When the Oslo process was in full bloom, and negotiating sessions were dragging on, Mr. Miller observed at one point in a Jerusalem hotel the Palestinian security chief, Jibril Rajub, and the Israeli Army's central commander, Shaul Mofaz, jokingly pretend to take a nap in the same bed, a remarkable tableau to contemplate.

In the end Mr. Miller seems to admire most the approach of Mr. Baker, a man who is anathema to most American Jews because of his toughness and lack of sentimentality. But this is precisely Mr. Miller's point: Israel, he says, needs tough love, and American officials must resist American Jewish pressure to give in always to Israeli demands. Here is his advice for the next president contemplating Arab-Israeli diplomacy: ''If you're not prepared to reassure the locals while cracking heads as needed (and both will be needed), don't bother.''